VPS city vs broker matching engine — who actually wins the race?

[LondonScalper]

Classic scalper argument: "Just get a London VPS" vs "Just pick the broker with LD4/NY4 matching." Reality is messier.

I care about **path**, not marketing city names.

What I measure:
1. VPS → broker gateway ping (ICMP is a hint, not gospel)
2. Order round-trip on a micro market order off-hours vs into London open
3. Whether the broker's "London server" is actually where your account is booked (ask support; answers vary from precise to poetic)

Things I've learned the hard way:
- A "London VPS" routed poorly can lose to a Frankfurt box with a clean path.
- Moving VPS closer helped less than switching account type / liquidity route on one broker.
- Windows timer + MT5 terminal overhead can dominate your fancy 0.3ms ping fantasy. Ping isn't fill.

Also: if you run Python signal → MT5 order, your bottleneck might be your own script, not Equinix. Ask me how I know.

For London-session FX scalps, what's your current VPS location + broker server combo?
Have you A/B tested two VPS cities with the *same* broker and same lot size?
Anyone running cTrader Open API / FIX and still using a consumer VPS, or did you outgrow that?

[PTScalper]

Hi,

thank you for this post, you are right
I found it out too but in hard way.

What VPS or Google cloud instance do you prefere?

Btw this is why big companies have coolocated their cluster in the same building or building next and invest hundreds of milions of $ to be there with orders first.